


J is for Deja Vu All Over Again

by greenbirds



Series: Friends'verse shorts [1]
Category: NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-07
Updated: 2011-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-16 04:20:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbirds/pseuds/greenbirds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A long time ago, Jack learned to tell his life in stories.  Companion piece to "Friends in Strange Places."  Written for Fig Newton's crossover alphabet soup.</p>
            </blockquote>





	J is for Deja Vu All Over Again

A long time ago in a place called Russia (the locals called it _Rossija,_ and sometimes he called it the ninth circle of Hell; it was certainly cold enough. He’s been worse places since then), Jack O’Neill learned to tell his life in stories.

(If you could start out with “once upon a time,” you could sometimes pretend it had happened to someone else).

Once upon a time, a young Air Force captain had a wicked stepmother (only she wasn’t really wicked at all, for all she sent her little ones to do deadly things in secret places). She was tiny and dark-haired and dark-eyed and fierce and dangerous like the sparrowhawk. Her enemies and some of her admirers called her the Duchess of Deception. Her friends called her Hetty Lange.

Her little ones (her ducklings) called her _tyotia_. It was Russian for Auntie.

Jack (he was the only one who could ever get away with it) sometimes called her Auntie Em.

Once upon a time, Auntie Em had two darling boys, and their names both started with ‘J’. Jack. Jethro (actually it was _Leroy_ Jethro, but Jack knew all about not liking one part of your given name or another, so he let it pass). In Russia (in _Rossija_ , in Tartarus) they all answered to different names (Vanya and Zhenya and when Auntie Em wore her Russian face – sometimes Jack thought it was her true face, she was Aunt Anya) and they gave gifts at New Year’s instead of Christmas.

They had been a funny little family, they three.

Once upon a time, the two boys (how good and how pleasant, as the saying went) had been as close as brothers and they had talked about wooden boats and clear blue seas and endless summer days and what they would do After. (After was whole worlds, strange as storybook land: after was pale American beer and wearing your own name and your own clothes and listening to whatever you wanted on the radio. After didn’t involve secrets. After didn’t include sniper rifles).

After was a gingerbread house with gumdrop trim and a witch with an oven lurking inside. After was the yellow brick road, complete with flying monkeys and poppies. After was, as it turned out, Baba Yaga’s skull filled with fire.

After was too good to be true.

Once upon a time, the Duchess of Deception (Auntie Em, St. Hetty, and their names for her were as numberless as the names of the stars) sent her darling boys to a place called Poland. It was summer and the light shone bright green through the leaves of the trees, and Jack and Jethro knew they were probably going there to die.

Jethro thought their _tyotia_ had betrayed them. Jack knew better. Jack knew she had no choice. Jack knew the work needed doing.

The game, as Auntie Em always pointed out, was worth the candle. (On the white nights, she said something else entirely: God hates a spy).

Once upon a time, two boys named Jack and Jethro had gone to Poland to die, but they didn’t, and Charon waited by the river unpaid.

Once upon a time Jack made a promise to a Polish girl named Maria, and Jethro broke it for him (Jethro saved Jack’s life in so doing, but that wasn’t the important part) and pretty Maria with her sweep of blonde hair died with a bullet through her heart and a look of faint surprise on her face.

Once upon a time, two boys named Jack and Jethro made their way home from Poland, but the story didn’t end in “happily ever after.” They were no longer Jack and Jethro, but O’Neill and Gibbs, and St. Hetty looked at them like her heart was breaking, and they never again talked about After.

Once upon a time (not long after Poland, not long after he forgot about After) the Air Force whistled Jack home again, and he was no longer Auntie Em’s little Vanyeshka. He learned to wear a different name.

They called him Batshit Jack, and he did dark things in dark places where the eyes don’t go, and his secret treasure was the names of missions that hadn’t killed him: East Fly and Chile and Argentina. He married and divorced a girl named Sarah (she was blonde like Maria and had almost believed that he loved her) and he had a son (a beautiful son; he had named him Charlie) and then his son died.

(Batshit Jack wasn’t supposed to know, wasn’t supposed to care, but he knew – never mind where he found the information because it didn’t matter – that Jethro had married a girl named Shannon, and Jethro’s marriage had also ended with a child’s funeral, and no amount of ‘once upon a time’ could ever make that go away.)

And for awhile there was nothing but despair and a sense that there would soon be no more stories to tell, and then two men in dress blues came to Jack and called him Underhill and he stepped through a ring of stone and quantum water into another world (the first of so many other worlds; you never forget your first time).

Once upon a time, a man named Batshit Jack went Underhill and changed one skin for another and became just Jack and wore a patch on his shoulder that meant _home_ in a secret language and met a man with glasses and a warrior who battled false gods and a woman who was as tough as she was brilliant as she was beautiful, and they sang him back into life.

The stories always said you shouldn’t eat of the fruit of the Underworld or you might never return (thus was pretty little Persephone trapped), so Jack took a big bite and filled his senses with it; he never wanted to go back. He didn’t even mind that his life was hemmed round in secrets and every day brought a new world waiting to kill them, because he had come home.

(He’d lost Britain, and he’d lost Gaul, but he found his soul again, and it didn’t seem like such a bad trade, the Legion’s road for the yellow brick one).

Once upon a time, the man named Jack and the man with glasses and the warrior and the brilliant woman mostly saved the universe.

And now it is a bitter early-spring day in Colorado and the wind is howling and nothing is green yet, and the man named Jack hasn’t thought of the old stories in years (the ones that begin “Once upon a time two boys went up to Baba Yaga’s house to learn the secret ways”) but he’s standing out on the tarmac in BDU’s watching man get off a plane (shoulda worn more clothes, O’Neill), and he’s thinking of them now.

Once upon a time, a Marine (one of Jethro’s people, before Hetty’s darling boy had become a civilian) who lived Underhill had gone out into the Real World and committed a terrible crime and (God hates a spy and Joyce said – though he used bigger words – that the end always comes back to the beginning) brought Jethro Gibbs through the mists to Jack’s doorstep.

Their eyes meet and for a moment it’s Vanya and Zhenya and the heavy gray clouds of a Leningrad winter and dreams of sailing the sea with the sun overhead and then it’s too hard not to think about summer in Poland, about Maria (about Jethro’s fucking _choice_ and Jack still can’t bring himself to thank Jethro for making it.)

(We Do Not Talk About Poland).

Jack forces a smile to his face (he knows it looks fake; Once upon a time Auntie Em’s darling boy had worn a thousand guises, each as familiar as his own name, but that was a long time ago), holds out a hand, tries to sound merry. “Jethro,” he says, “talk about a blast from the past. How long’s it been?”

Jack’s a liar: all Cretans are (which he supposes is better than being Cassandra; no one ever listened to her): he could count off the time between _then_ and _now_ (the time since green trees and a pretty dead girl) almost down to the day, but the forms must be followed.

“Since Poland,” Gibbs (Jethro, Zhenya, once a brother-in-arms) says unnecessarily. “Two ex-wives ago, if you’re curious.” (Jack shouldn’t be but he is). “We’re here about Sgt. McAvoy.”

Jethro’s gotten old. Time has laid its slow heavy hand on all of them, and these days, every morning, Jack’s knees sing a song of too many trips to too many worlds. (Here they are in the middle way, having had twenty years).

“This way,” Jack says. “I’ll introduce you to my team.”

(O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.)


End file.
